Voting not so brisk in parts of Delhi, only 10% turn up in Saket

Voting was not really that brisk in the pre-lunch period in many parts of New Delhi.

There were two polling stations at Jamia Millia Islamia campus which saw slightly brisk voting, with families turning out to cast their votes, many women in burkhas and men with their beards, and children tagging along. There were as many women as there were men at the polling stations at this university. Almost all of them are Muslims.

The general view among people here is that 80% of the vote in the Jamia campus, the adjoining Jamia Nagar and Zakir Nagar, comprising nearly 1.25 lakh voters, will opt for the Congress candidate. This area falls under the East Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, where the Congress candidate is Sandeep Dikshit, and the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) is Rajmohan Gandhi. The Congress voters have been mobilised. An activist also confided that half the vote was also going for the AAP.

Asif Mohammed Khan, the Congress MLA (he was in the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) earlier) said voting will pick up post-lunch, when women will turn up after completing their household chores. There were complaints that booths and the voter lists had not been specified, and people were forced to run from one polling station to another – and they are located two kilometres apart at the two ends of the Jamia campus – due to the confusion.

Voters were curiously lethargic in the J and M blocks of Saket, which falls under the New Delhi constituency, and from where the Congress’ Ajay Maken, the BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi and the AAP’s Ashish Khetan, along with a bunch of independents are in the poll fray. AAP workers said, compared to the December Assembly election, this time around the voter turnout was quite disappointing. Of the 2,500 voters at this polling station, less than 10% came to vote on Thursday morning. They said 65% of the vote from these two residential blocks had gone to the AAP in the assembly election.